Are Movies Just Too Long?

There was a time when going to the cinema meant committing a couple of hours to a movie.

Now it can feel like signing a short-term tenancy agreement.

The two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster has become increasingly normal, three hours no longer feels particularly shocking, and somewhere along the way the humble 90-minute movie appears to have become an endangered species.

And it turns out we're not imagining it.

Film industry analyst Stephen Follows analysed the running times of more than 36,000 theatrically released movies between 1980 and 2025. While the average across all films has stayed relatively stable at around 100–103 minutes, the movies getting the widest cinema releases have grown considerably longer.

According to research reported by Euronews, wide releases averaged around 106 minutes during the 1990s and early 2000s. In the 2020s, that figure has climbed to around 114 minutes. Action movies are the biggest offenders, now averaging a hefty 128 minutes.

The obvious question is: why?

Part of it is probably the blockbuster arms race. If a movie costs $200 million and arrives carrying the future of an entire franchise on its shoulders, nobody wants it to feel small. More characters. More action. More backstory. More universes being established for films we haven't even been asked if we want yet.

But there's an interesting contradiction happening at exactly the same time.

Our entertainment is getting shorter everywhere else.

TikTok, Reels, Shorts and endless scrolling have trained us to consume entertainment in seconds, yet Hollywood increasingly expects us to sit completely still for three hours while somebody saves the universe.

Again.

And audiences may finally be pushing back. A July 2026 Talker Research survey of 2,000 Americans found their ideal movie length was just 88 minutes, down from 92 minutes when the same question was asked in 2024. Only 10% thought two hours or longer was ideal.

Cinemas aren't necessarily thrilled either. Picturehouse creative director Clare Binns has argued that overly long films make screenings harder to schedule and can put audiences off committing to a trip to the cinema. Her verdict on plenty of modern movies? They could lose 20 minutes.

She's probably right.

Because length itself isn't really the problem.

The Godfather is nearly three hours. Oppenheimer is three hours. Plenty of brilliant films are long without ever feeling long.

Meanwhile, we've all watched 100-minute movies that somehow appear to last until Thursday.

The real crime is unnecessary length.

If every scene matters, take all the time you need. But if we're sitting through another exposition dump, three fake endings and 25 minutes establishing a sequel, perhaps somebody in the edit suite needs to rediscover the delete button.

At Recce, we're all for epic cinema.

We'd just quite like the word epic to describe the movie rather than the amount of time we've been sitting in the chair.